WIRED published a report today that ICE collected nearly one million people's DNA last year, including young children. For scale: Georgetown Law found last year that DHS had uploaded over 2.6 million profiles to CODIS by mid-2025, up from roughly 25,000 over the entire 15 years prior. More than 133,000 of those profiles belong to children and teenagers. Between December 2024 and April 2025, 97 percent of the roughly 300,000 profiles DHS submitted came from people in civil detention, not criminal custody. The thing that sticks with me: there is no separate index. Profiles from civil detainees go into the same CODIS database as convicted offenders and crime-scene evidence. Once uploaded, your DNA is searched against every forensic sample from every participating jurisdiction in the country, with no expiration. The legal authority DHS cites is legitimate. The DNA Fingerprint Act of 2005 authorizes collection from anyone in federal custody regardless of the basis for detention. That is a plain reading of the statute, not an overreach on its face. Whether Congress meant it to encompass millions of people in civil immigration proceedings is the live legal question.   submitted by   /u/NaturalRest9490 [link]   [comments]